Experience Planner

Online reputation systems have become part of the experience of many websites, helping users make smarter decisions and stimulating them to participate on a regular basis. A popular example of online reputation is the star-rating system that tells you if a book is worth reading based on users’ ratings. Amazon, for instance, uses this feature to assist customers during their shopping process. Those who are unsure about whether to buy book A or book B can look at the number of stars for each book, and then make an educated guess on which one is the best.

There are different types of reputation systems, and some of them have people as entities that can build reputation. BookMooch – an online community that promotes book swapping – uses a feedback score to help users evaluate the reliability of their peers. On the other hand, Yelp – a website that displays reviews for services, such as hotels, bars and restaurants – lets its users give badges to those who provide useful information.

Even though online reputation systems can be very useful, they may also bring new challenges to the sites that use them. An early obstacle for any reputation system is in capturing user feedback. Just because a website allows users to provide ratings and reviews, it does not mean that users will actually do it. Another obstacle is in figuring out which reputation model is the most suitable for the product or service that is being offered. Because there is no universal reputation system that will work for all sites, the choice of which one to use depends on the type of community, the site’s purpose and the technology constraints of each project.

On my future posts, I’ll try to highlight the importance of online reputation in an information-overloaded space. I’ll also pinpoint the effects that may arise from interaction under such community-controlled rules. The mail goal here is to provide a quick report of issues to be considered when designing your reputation systems.

(This post is part of my research for the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management academic program at Kent State University).